Change is inevitable for subscription businesses and it is taking place every day. Customers are adding subscriptions, cancelling services and everything in between. Change directly impacts the team members that are engaged (sales, customer success, technical support, professional services) with prospects and clients and can create substantial challenges as you align those resources to your business objectives within each stage of growth. By measuring all levels of engagement that your sales team has with your target market, you have the ability drive the results from the top of the pipeline all the way to closed customers and long-term retention. In this blog, we are going to discuss how change impacts your workforce and some concepts for how to manage it as a subscription economy business.

Acquisition Stage

Before you start to manage change, you have to think about ways to capture the key information about your early customer engagements that can be used to help steer you through driving the significant growth you’ll want later. As you capture the logical elements like average deal cycle, buyer journey and resources required to support key steps in the engagement, you also need to consider what your team’s true capacity is and how to best align. This would also include key information at the individual level. In this stage, virtually everyone in the organization is a salesperson, so the name of the game is aligning top resources with the best opportunities. As organizations grow in this phase, they will want to determine how long they want their sales team that closed the new logo to stay engaged with the client and what incentives and measurement they will put in place to drive the results that the business needs to continue growing.

Predict sales team member success based on statistical models which include any number of variables, such as demographic and market data.

Creates a collaborative set of information, tying it directly to the incentive portion of each individual’s income.

Retention Stage

In this stage, businesses’ need to start implementing a hunter / farmer model to properly manage their existing accounts, sharing quota with sales managers and other support staff who work alongside the direct sales team.

Growth businesses start compiling the historical data required to more accurately project productivity and the capacity of account managers and other support staff to deal with growth spikes. You may only need three new sales representatives to land 100 more customers, but how many new account managers will you need to keep them engaged, and what is your ideal profile for new hires in each of those roles?

In this stage, businesses need to start thinking about using tools that will provide a good level of content-rich customer information and unsolicited support. It’s a strategy that enables a smaller number of sales support personnel to handle a larger number of customers.

Understand and model the capabilities of the sales team and predict the capacity they will have to (1) pursue your target market and (2) retain & grow your existing customers in a meaningful manner.

Help determine the core objectives for each role/team and dynamically calculate total compensation costs based on business unit or individual employee-level driver assumptions.

Include headcount, compensation, productivity and capacity data into forms, reports and dashboards.

Monetization Stage

As businesses change, goals change and managing the people that manage those changes is complex. Maturing businesses have the historical data required to project productivity fairly accurately. They have been through some growth spikes and found ways to cope with added capacity. The next step in capacity planning is to cluster by geography, sales representatives’ skills, aptitudes and vendor relationships.

Maturing businesses leverage Workforce Management solutions to:

Manage the impact of all employee events, such as onboarding, transfers, merit increases, promotions, leaves, terminations and retirements.

Ensure all changes to employee hierarchies and attributes are time effective.

Leveraging workforce management within a sales performance management solution can help your business enhance financial management of the sales organization by forecasting and planning for all compensation-related costs, at every stage of growth. An effective workforce management solution can increase employee morale by managing all employee-related change events. It can also improve visibility to view, manage and drive these results.

Philip Kaszuba

Philip is responsible for developing sales strategies and providing leadership to the inside and field sales teams to deliver growth results. Philip has a proven track record of successfully building sales, marketing and customer facing teams in the high tech market across software, services and product based revenue streams. Philip led teams from initial concept to successfully establishing critical reference customers and predictable, scalable revenue models. Prior to Obero SPM, Phil was the President of DMTI Spatial which was successfully sold to Neopost in Oct 2013. During Phil’s time at DMTI, the team managed the transition from a legacy data-services company to a full-fledged cloud organization servicing the banking, insurance and telco markets. Phil’s career also included successfully leading various teams at Sun Microsystems, Crystal Reports and other B2B software companies.